Abstract Creative thinking is desirable in many professions. This article reports new research that followed a design science approach to develop and investigate a co‐creative tool called Sport Sparks in one profession – the coaching of professional football players. In response to a coach entering a text description of a coaching challenge (e.g., struggling to maintain the fitness of an athlete) into the tool, the tool automatically generated potentially novel ideas (e.g., reducing game time and changing their nutrition) that the coach could select and/or adapt and evolve into a simple action plan (e.g., which links nutrition to increased game time). This Sport Sparks tool was designed to be an example of human‐centred artificial intelligence that aspires to empower humans, to deliver high levels of human control as well as automation, and empower people rather than emulate their expertise. It was engineered with rule‐based reasoning to automate the generation of potential new ideas that coaches could select and refine during interactions which provide high user control over this automation. The potential of such a co‐creative tool, and value of the guidelines, were demonstrated during the tool's evaluation by coaching practitioners at a Premier League football club. The practitioners used the tool to generate new ideas to coaching challenges, and reported evidence of different forms of creative thinking, although some also reported the need for more support for creative collaborations and solution planning. The paper ends by discussing future directions for both the Sport Sparks tool and other co‐creative AI tools.

Sport Sparks™ is a new digital tool that has been researched and developed to augment the creative thinking of sports coaches when resolving challenges experienced by athletes. Most sports coaches work across multiple training sites and have limited opportunities and resources for creative thinking. The Sport Sparks™ tool was designed to provide ready-to-use guidance for creative thinking, via mobile devices, that is generated using automated natural language processing, rule-based reasoning and creative search. This short technical demonstration paper summarises and demonstrates with examples the different strategies and features implemented in Sport Sparks™ to augment coach creative thinking.

Creativity’s importance to organisations and businesses is now recognised to be a precondition for both design and innovation. One strategy is to introduce new forms of information system that support human creative thinking by their employees. Most successful uses have been in professional disciplines in the creative industries such as design and theatre. This paper reports the design and evaluation of a new information system that was researched and developed to support human creativity in a non-creative industry – health-and-safety in a manufacturing plant. An established risk detection and resolution process in one plant was extended with the new system to support plant employees to think creatively about resolutions to health-and-safety risks. The new system was used in a manufacturing plant for over 3 months. Results revealed that a subset of the risk resolutions generated with the new system were more creative and more complete than risk resolutions generated without the system in a corresponding period. However, the employees needed more time than was available to generate more complete risk resolutions. The evaluation results led to coordinated changes to both the information system and work practices associated with it.

This paper reports the results of research that sought the long-term uptake of digital support for human creativity to improve health-and-safety in 3 manufacturing plants over an 18-month period. The systematic risk detection and reso-lution processes of each plant were extended with digital support for employees to think creatively about resolutions to encountered health-and-safety risks. The different uses, successful and unsuccessful, revealed which digitized crea-tivity techniques were effective, different enablers for and barriers to the uptake of the digital creativity support in complex work places, and the importance of management support for aligning work practices and digital capabilities to support creative thinking.

This paper reports an evaluation of digital support for human creativity to improve health-and-safety in one manufacturing plant. It reports the use of this support as part of the plant's risk management process over 66 working days. Results revealed that this use led to more complete, more useful and more novel risk resolutions, compared with the original paper process, and informed how digital creativity support can be rolled out across manufacturing plants, as well as to other domains not recognized as creative.

In order to be successful, software (applications) must be both useful and innovative. Techniques for determining the requirements (functions and qualities) of software have traditionally focused on utility, with a prominent body of work using graphical goal modeling and analysis to ensure that system functions meet the needs (goals) of users. However, these techniques are not designed to foster creativity, meaning that resulting systems may be functionally useful but not sufficiently innovative. Further work has focused on creativity workshops for finding and developing software requirements. However, creative outputs are not grounded in user goals, are not amenable to decision support techniques, and cannot be easily captured by non-experts. In this work we report initial progress on a project aiming to combine goal modeling and creativity techniques for enhanced software Requirements Engineering (RE). We apply our methods to a historical case in air traffic control, providing example outcomes, illustrating the benefits of a creativity- and goal-oriented approach to early software development.

The purpose of requirements validation is to determine whether a large requirements set will lead to the achievement of system-related goals under different conditions — a task that needs automation if it is to be performed quickly and accurately. One reason for the current lack of software tools to undertake such validation is the absence of the computational mechanisms needed to associate scenario, system specification and goal analysis tools. Therefore, in this paper, we report first research experiments in developing these new capabilities, and demonstrate them with a non-trivial example associated with a Rolls Royce aircraft engine software component.

This paper presents our experiences of exploring how i* modelling can be used as a bridge between informal air traffic management (ATM) operational concepts and formal agent-based simulation. We report our work on an EU airspace design project that describes a revised concept of operations for lower level airspace around airports, and includes simulation based safety analysis of the critical scenarios. We describe our research towards using i* to address two challenges-how to model the revised concept from the informal concept of operations document, and how to present safety critical scenarios to operational experts. Modelling strategic aspects of a concept of operations is new to ATM, and we draw upon our experiences to provide lessons learned and directions for future work.

This paper reports the integration of satisfaction arguments into i* goal modelling to support analyses of the impact of new software systems on system-wide goals. Integration is based on a conceptual model that relates satisfaction argument and i* model concepts. New impact analysis procedures based on the integrated models and satisfaction arguments are introduced.

This paper describes our REDEPEND tool for i* goal modelling and analysis, and new features designed to make it more usable and useful. Pattern-based techniques that generate text requirements statements from graphical i* models improve the productivity and utility of REDEPEND in requirements projects